


Sugar Magnolia

by Shay_Fae



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Concerts, Idiots in Love, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Recreational Drug Use, The Grateful Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:42:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29443533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shay_Fae/pseuds/Shay_Fae
Summary: The boys sneak out to see The Grateful Dead in September of ‘74.Alternatively: Sirius isn’t sure what he’s feeling but he hasn’t been able to look Remus dead-on since term started and there’s only so long he can keep this up.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 14
Kudos: 38





	Sugar Magnolia

Some seventh years have a portkey going the night of the 11th and Remus miraculously arranges space for two of them, which is fine anyway because James has detention and Peter isn’t really much a Deadhead. Sirius spends too long on his hair that morning even though he knows it doesn’t matter, and at dinner he splits an edible with Remus that he got from Zabini at much too high a markup but paid for with the money Sirius had spent all summer playing nice with his parents to get. Thinking about all the arguments he had to swallow and rolled eyes he had to suppress so he could spend his mother’s galleons on weed makes it better somehow. Like he had damn-well earned this high. 

James scowls at them as they peel off from the Gryffindor table, but he and Peter still take their bags so they don’t have to risk dropping them in the dormitory.

“This is cosmically unfair,” James says. Sirius flips him the Vee as he grabs a chicken leg on their way out but Remus spares him a sympathetic smile.

“If they play Dark Star, we’ll think of you,” Remus promises.

“You don’t even like them half as much as I do,” James moans to Sirius, which is true, but Sirius also didn’t get caught nabbing doxy wings from the potions cupboard last week.

“Give Minny a kiss for us?” Sirius teases, and Peter waves to them gamely as they head through the Great Hall doors. 

They ball their robes into a corner in the tunnel behind the statue, and Sirius carefully stares at the wall as they change into the jeans and tees they stashed down here during study hall. He doesn’t know when he started to feel guilty looking at Remus while they changed in the dorms, sometime before the end of last year if he’s really honest with himself, but what matters is that the line of Remus’s spine makes him feel vaguely criminal and sweaty and so he keeps his eyes to himself as they struggle trying to button up with the low ceiling and then bolt, pell-mell, down the tunnel towards town. 

“I can’t fucking believe it,” Sirius pants as they run. Sometime over the summer he’d decided cursing was about the coolest thing a person could do, and resolved to add in “fuck” wherever he could in his sentences. “This is so fucking cool.”

Remus grins at Sirius over his shoulder- the git could always outpace them all, was more athletic than even James but didn’t do anything about it. “I know,” he says, delighted, and Sirius feels that pull again at the pit of his stomach that he’s started to notice every time Remus smiles at him or laughs at one of his jokes or really pays any attention to Sirius at all.

It had been a long summer and they’d written to each other almost every day. Sirius had been trapped at the Black House in the city, melting day by day in the terrible London heat that filtered up through the sidewalk and the Underground vents, with nothing to do but write letters to Remus, who was also bored in his little town up North and would answer back often within a few hours. Remus was funny in a dry, sarcastic way, Sirius had always known this, but in their daily letters Sirius found himself laughing so hard locked away in his dark room that he forgot he was in this house that he hated with his wretched excuses for parents. 

They’ve been back at Hogwarts not even two weeks and Sirius isn’t sure how to tell Remus that sometime over the summer Remus and his letters had become another world for Sirius, an island that Sirius would visit when his mother spewed vile at him or he could hear Regulus crying in the next room or sometimes very late at night when sleep blended into fantasy and he woke up shaking and still thinking of Remus’s hands. 

Sirius isn’t sure that’s something that can even really be said to a person, but he hasn’t been able to look Remus dead-on since term started and there’s only so long he can keep this up. 

In Hogsmeade, they find Dearborn and the other seventh years behind the Hog’s Head with a brown paper bag on the floor. Dearborn smiles when they appear, and he beckons to Remus with a tilt of his jaw, to which Remus responds immediately. Sirius watches it happen and follows Remus, wondering not for the first time how Remus knew Caradoc enough to ask if they could tag along.

“You guys get down here okay?” Dearborn asks and Sirius almost rolls his eyes, thinks of pointing out that they’re clearly standing here just fine, but Remus smiles up at the Ravenclaw and runs a hand through his hair. 

He’s being doing that a lot since they got back from summer hols and Sirius thinks it looks stupid. 

“Yeah,” Remus says, “thanks for taking us.”

“Izzy got Mumblemumps,” Dearborn says, but he doesn’t look very sorry about it, Sirius thinks. He still hasn’t looked at Sirius once. “My brother wrote to me- he saw them yesterday, said it was unbelievable.”

“That’s really cool,” Remus says, and it sounds like he means it. 

Sirius hates how they’re just staring at each other, how close they’re standing, but then they’re spared any further conversation by the bag going blue. Remus grabs Dearborn’s arm but he also holds Sirius’s hand, linking their fingers together like they’re going to be doing this for longer than just the portkey.

Remus’s hand is warm and a little sweaty because they’ve been running, the skin of his knuckles cracked and peeling under Sirius’s thumb. It’s all Sirius can think about as the ground vanishes out from under them and the world begins to spin.  They twist and appear in between some of the trees at the end of the lawn behind Alexandra’s Palace. Sirius feels sick, his head swimming, but Remus squeezes their hands where they’re connected and doesn’t let go until they’ve all started traipsing up the hill towards the front doors. Someone’s already got a joint lit and before they duck around the corner, it gets passed to Sirius. He’s not sure if it's the best idea- the edible hasn’t kicked in yet at all and he has no idea what he’s in for, but Remus had smoked it a turn before and so Sirius does it too. If they’re going down, it’s together anyway.

A Slytherin named Patty, who Sirius thinks is on their quidditch team, only confounds one usher but they end up somewhere near the stage. Sirius is vibrating at the very edges of his skin- to be here at all, and to hear them in person, and to have done something as wildly against the rules as to have snuck down to London on a school night. The weed is also likely a part of this.

“Nice shirt,” Dearborn says to Remus, and Sirius lets himself look at Remus’s chest for the first time. 

It’s got the  _ Aoxomoxoa _ album art on it and Sirius tries, admirably hard he thinks, to focus on the colors without noticing that Remus seems to have grown shoulders sometime this summer, the hollows of his collarbones visible just above the neckline like you could drink from them. Sirius feels hot all the way to his toes and then looks up to find Dearborn staring just the same. 

He could kill Dearborn, Sirius thinks, which is probably an overreaction to someone ogling your mate. Then, he thinks, what the fuck is Dearborn doing ogling Remus.

“I got it at that charity shop on Kings Street,” Remus says. Sirius does not think he looks appropriately annoyed that he’s being ogled. In fact, he doesn’t really look annoyed at all, smiling up at Dearborn through his lashes and fingering the edges of his tee-shirt like he’s suddenly gone shy.

Remus is many things- clever, devious, stubborn to a fault- but Sirius has never seen him look shy.

“That’s a real find,” Dearborn is saying while Sirius tries to run through all his memories of Remus to find one of Remus ever blushing like that with someone, wide across the tops of his cheeks. “Every time I go, I only manage to find a heap of rubbish.”

“You havta go on Tuesdays,” Remus says. “That’s when they put out all the new stuff; you know Isla at the till?” 

“You’ll introduce me,” Dearborn says and while Sirius watches he reaches out and touches the bones of Remus’s wrist like he’s done it before, like he isn’t worried they’ll cut him the way Sirius always feels when he looks at where Remus’s skin is stretched tight.

The crowd is building steadily around them, pushing them all into a tighter knit, and Sirius catches Dearborn glance down to Remus’s mouth as they’re jostled against each other. It shoots through Sirius like a physical slap and he almost wants to leave, wonders if Remus would even notice if Sirius turned around and left the concert hall, wrapped up as he seemed to be in the older boy.

Sirius has kissed only one and a half people so far- Mary, at the end of their Hogsmeade date last year, and James on a dare in their second year which he doesn’t think should count and so only gives it a half. The kiss with Mary, which definitely counts Sirius is sure, had been brief. Nice, Sirius remembers thinking, and warm, with his hand against Mary’s waist and the smell of her fruity shampoo in his nose. 

There had been two more Hogsmeade weekends before term ended and Sirius hadn’t asked her out for either of them, though he’s pretty sure she’d have said yes. That was around the time Sirius had started to feel like he was doing something supremely dangerous every time his eyes passed over Remus’s back and hips when they changed before bed. Sirius hadn’t really thought they were connected, in the moment, but standing now in the press of the concert hall they suddenly seem intimately related.

Sirius wonders if Remus and Dearborn have kissed. He feels guilty for essentially calling Remus a poof in his head and then that guilt is immediately swallowed up by the fear that Remus might actually be more sexually experienced than Sirius is, which ought to be illegal, Sirius is sure.

Remus’s arm brushes against his and as Jerry and Phil and the whole band begin to take the stage in the wildest applause Sirius has ever been a part of. Sirius jumps at the contact.

“What song do you think they’ll open with?” Remus speaks into his ear as Billy fixes with drums. His breath leaves goosebumps down the whole back of Sirius’s neck, even as he’s already started sweating through his shirt. 

“Bertha,” Sirius says, with unearned confidence. 

“I just hope they do Sugar Magnolia,” Remus says, which Sirius laughs at him about, and then the show starts.

Remus had been the one to introduce them all to the Dead, autumn of their third year when James had gotten way too into muggle music in his new effort to impress Lily, and had snuck a record player into the dorm he’d gotten his cousin to shrink down. It had become something of an unspoken competition between them to bring back the coolest records they could find from Hogsmeade Sundays and trades with other students. 

Third year fall was also when they’d all discovered weed, introduced to James by said older cousin that summer on a Potter family holiday in the Maldives, and the two new interests had gone rather well together. Remus, unpredictably, had gotten the most into it. He said it helped with his moon pains. 

There’s static as the amps fire up and they open with “Scarlet Begonias,” which Remus tries to argue should at least half-count as him being right. Somewhere in the middle of “Brown Eyed Women” the edible kicks in and Sirius can suddenly feel the bass on the inner edges of his nerves. Jerry slides his fingers across an impossibly good riff and he looks over at Remus to find Remus staring right back, looking just as lost in the music and the universe as Sirius feels, both of them dancing just a sway in the tight press of the crowds near the front.

It’s easy to forget about Dearborn. The drug moves through Sirius’s limbs and nerves almost in time with the music, and whenever Sirius opens his eyes he finds Remus moving or smiling or reaching out to grab Sirius’s elbow and yell something in his ear.

Time must move somehow, maybe an hour or so, until the Dead flow into a long jam somewhere around “Playing in the Band” and Sirius, who has by this point been almost drifting as he watches the concert, turns and catches Remus saying something to Dearborn, who’s bent down an inch so Remus can speak into his ear over the noise of the show. Remus has his other hand leaning against Dearborn’s arm, for balance, and the stage lights catch his hair and the top half of his left eye, as if struck by lightning. Sirius watches Dearborn get his hand beneath Remus’s elbow, holding him in place, and it makes Remus- who came back this summer a head taller than Sirius and refusing to shut up about it- look small and delicate. 

Sirius doesn’t know why the sight makes his head swim and suddenly the high he’s in becomes just over too much, as his stomach revolts. He turns and taps Remus’s shoulder, a little beast in his chest crowing at the way Remus looks over at once and holds his gaze, Dearborn forgotten.

“I’m gonna go sit down for a bit, you wanna come?” Sirius asks and Remus nods, says something to Dearborn, and follows Sirius to the back of the general admission, where in fact plenty of people are sitting, leaning on bannisters or against the base of the stairs. He and Remus find a corner near the back, more towards the dark and near a group of friends who are actively smoking. They sit against what might be a sound mixer and Sirius can feel how damp Remus is, how sweaty they both are after over an hour in the crowd. 

“You okay?” Remus asks and Sirius nods, even though his stomach still feels somewhat uneasy. 

“You?” he asks and Remus gives him that smile again. He’s holding his knees with his arms around them, and his pale forearms in the stage lights almost glow. Not for the first time, Sirius notices the scar across Remus’s nose- the one he gave himself that July- and wants to touch it. 

“This is unbelievable,” Remus says, eyes wide and his pupils fully blown, a drop of sweat making its way from his temple down his cheek.

Sirius watches its descent and asks, “What’s going on with you and Dearborn?” which is not a response to that statement at all but that comes instead from the dark, twisted part of Sirius that wants to reach its tendrils out sometimes and grab at objects and people so they can’t ever leave. 

The music starts to shift just then, the sound warping and becoming almost dissonant and malevolent. For a flash, but Sirius still catches it, Remus looks terrified. 

“He lives near me,” Remus says, and shrugs like it doesn’t matter. Sirius has been his friend long enough to know that means it matters a great deal. “We hung out this summer.”

“He keeps looking at you like he wants to fucking snog you or something,” Sirius can’t help but blurt out his terrible fear, and hopes he said it flippantly enough for it to sound like a joke, but Remus goes all red like he was lit aflame and this is somehow a worse response than if he’d actually said yes.

“You didn’t,” Sirius coughs. He can’t quite believe it. When Remus stays silent, Sirius realizes he’s going to have to be the one to talk if he doesn’t want Remus to bolt. He knows well enough by now that Remus is a runner.

“What, are you queer now?” Sirius manages, his voice cracking, and Remus shakes his head. He looks just a touch destroyed.

“I don’t know,” Remus murmurs. Sirius only catches it because he’s watching Remus’s mouth in a way that now feels terribly suspect.

Sirius has long since lost track of the music, it’s gone utterly off the rails into a miserable mess of noise. It’s peeling at his skin, he feels dangerous and terrified and yes that definitely is the third wave of the edible hitting him like a crashing foam against the sand, ebbing out only to hit him again.

It occurs to Sirius that he is being “come out” to, and that the event maybe deserves some respect. He tries to focus.

“Well, okay then!” Sirius says, a hair too loud. “Fuck, sure alright. Are you two...you’re together now?”

“No!” Remus practically shouts, and then glances around before adding, at a much more reasonable volume, “No, not really. It was like a summer thing.”

“Oh, cool,” Sirius says. It does not feel cool, but Remus no longer looks like he’s about to boke, so he’s hopefully saying the right things. 

Remus laughs in hysterical disbelief, and drops his head to his knees so his face is hidden. Sirius leans back on his palms and tries to ease into the sound so his stomach will stop doing somersaults. Through the haze of his high it sounds like the invert of the German metal Peter showed them all once, and it’s like going to a concert in outer space, Sirius thinks. He’s being performed to by aliens and Remus just told him he’s gay and also definitely at least kissed Caradoc Dearborn this summer. 

“There’s not a lot of other wizards where we live,” Remus says after a while, and Sirius refocuses from watching Jerry and Phil lean towards each other across the stage where they’re sitting. “So we ran into each other a bunch. A few times he just...we would take these walks.”

“Oh, okay,” Sirius says, remarkably calmly he thinks.

“It wasn’t like a big deal, or anything,” Remus stammers.

“Right, yeah.”

Remus pauses a beat. “Are you gonna tell the others?” he asks.

“Not if you don’t want me to, no,” Sirius says, although he thinks he’ll probably at least tell James, who he tells nearly everything to. James will be good about it, Sirius knows, because James is a prince amongst men and good about everything. If James were here, he’d know what to say while his best friend admits he’s a poof. Probably something beautiful like  _ we love you just the same _ . James has always been a touch too poetic.

Remus still seems close to frozen, so Sirius offers, “Dearborn’s fucking fine, honestly,” which Sirius has to grudgingly admit is true, but it earns him such a breathless Moony smile that Sirius feels himself move above the cacophony of this atonal stretch they’ve been looped into for what feels like hours. 

Sirius thinks of Remus kissing Dearborn again, only this time he doesn’t picture Dearborn at all, just imagines the wet, wide hollow of Moony’s mouth and the finger press of his thumbs into someone’s jaw, holding it open enough to flick his tongue in. He knows it’s nine-tenths the weed moving its way through his body leaving him randy, but he watches Remus watch the band, Remus’s eyes closed and his chin on his knees, and Sirius wants everything that Dearborn’s ever had. 

“What do you think they’re doing?” Sirius asks eventually. He’s fully lost track of time, has given up on keeping it entirely. Maybe this will just be the rest of the show.

Remus doesn’t open his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says, head moving to a non-existent rhythm. “It’s kind of beautiful though.”

You’re kind of beautiful, Sirius thinks, and it comes from absolutely nowhere so he knows it's the drugs. Markup or not, Zabini did well.

As if he can read Sirius’s mind, a terrifying thought right now, Remus asks, “How high do you think they are?”

“How high are you?” Sirius asks, because Remus still hasn’t opened his eyes and has managed to sweat through the entire back of his shirt. 

“It sorta feels like I’m inside the music,” Remus says, an answer in itself. 

Sirius stands and reaches a hand down. “Come on, I have to piss,” he says.

Remus blinks his eyes open then, staring up at Sirius through those impossible eyelashes. “That sounds distinctly like a you problem,” Remus says, mouth curving around the words, and Sirius wonders if he’s died. 

Instead he snorts, says, “Let’s go,” again, and this time Remus does grab his hand and lets Sirius pull him up. He stumbles and presses, just briefly, into the meat of Sirius’s body and everywhere they touch feels warm and electric. Sirius wants to keep holding him but can’t think of a reason to and so they untangle, moving towards the side of the hall.

In the bathroom, the windows are open and a handful of kids in wide-legged trousers and graphic tees have climbed up the sinks to hang half in and half out- in one case with a leg still dangling inside while the rest of the body sits on the grass above them. Remus wanders over to the group while Sirius pees and he can hear them chatting a bit about the sound of the concert, which they can still hear clearly from the bathroom.

“How old are you two?” one of the boys asks, only his head still level with the window.

“Eighteen,” Remus lies, and the group laughs. 

“Shove off, you’re fifteen if even,” a girl says. Sirius is a little impressed. He’ll be fifteen in two months, but Remus is fourteen for another half year which never seemed right. He’s always felt like the oldest of the four, the most mature, the one to remind Sirius and James and even Peter sometimes that overflowing all the toilets with fake blood is disgusting, sure, but not a particularly clever prank.

“Got better taste in music than I did at fifteen,” one of the boys says, and Remus seems to take this as a sign to scramble on top of the sink and stick his head out the window with the rest of them. 

“Thanks,” Sirius hears Remus reply. Sirius zips up his jeans and watches Remus through the warped glass push his hands into the dirt and hoist himself up before peeking back down and holding a hand out to Sirius.

Out on the grass by the building wall, Sirius discovers there’s six people, resting somewhat on top of each other and circling around two lit joints. Sirius, a little dizzy from the climb and the everything in his system, follows suit and leans his whole body against Remus where they’re sitting, relaxing into the solid mass of him. Remus doesn’t say a word, just hooks his chin on top of Sirius’s skull and takes the joint in between his thumb and pointer when it reaches him.

“Fuck off, you’re smoking more?” Sirius asks in what he thinks is a whisper but, as the rest of the group bursts into laughter, figures probably wasn’t. 

“You don’t need to,” Remus promises. Sirius can hear him inhaling, and he turns his head in time to watch Remus exhale, his cheeks hollowing and the paper resting just on the swell of his bottom lip. 

Sirius takes the joint anyway, and thinks it’s almost like their lips have touched. The smoke hits the back of his throat, shivers through his lungs, and Sirius barely manages to pass it before he can feel this new high mixing with his old, all of the different strains inside him lighting up his nerves like he’s a real constellation. 

“Is this your first time seeing them?” one of the girls asks Remus, who nods. Sirius can feel him nodding against the side of his head, can feel Remus looping an arm around his chest to keep Sirius sitting up and nearby. After hours of carefully constructed distance, it feels like gliding into a warm bath to relax into Remus’s chest, to have him pressed up against the bones of Sirius’s spine. Both of them are sweaty and they stick and it should be disgusting but Sirius would swear this is heaven, Remus’s thumb rubbing gently back and forth against Sirius’s sternum.

“We saw them Monday and Tuesday,” the girl is telling Remus. Maybe she’s telling Sirius too, he’s not sure. He’s not sure he’s even here still, only knows he’s at the concert because he can still hear the terrible, alien screeching of the guitars from somewhere just beneath him. “It’s been different every time, they’re just incredible.”

“Did they do this every time?” Remus asks. Sirius can hear the vibrations of his talking rattling around in Sirius’s own chest where they’re connected.

“Not this long, no,” one of the boys says. “It’s wicked, right?”

“Brilliant,” Remus says but Sirius is not sure he agrees. He’d rather like it if it went back to melody and words soon.

As if the music gods can hear his desperate wish, Sirius feels the base shift, the guitar lift, and just when it feels like he might be swallowed by these malevolent note spirits, Sirius can recognize what song they’re listening to.

“Oh, I hoped they’d do this song,” the girl says. 

Remus hums into Sirius’s hair and it’s like a cloud has lifted, this breathless emergence back into the world of harmony and melody. He figures they’ll run back down into the pit but no one seems to be in a rush and Remus seems to sense anyway that Sirius needs to sit still for a while so they stay with the little ragtag group through “Eyes of the World” and a long, complicated jam that follows. One of the girls pulls out a bag of gummy candies at some point, and the sugar melts on Sirius’s tongue like rainwater when she places it between his lips. 

It revives him enough to realize that Remus and the bloke they’re sitting next to have been quietly chatting for possibly ages, a fact that fills Sirius with a burst of such roiling, furious jealousy that it knocks him out almost as much as the drugs. He struggles up and Remus moves his arm to lay across Sirius’s back, still holding him close.

“Hey there,” Remus murmurs and Sirius forgets he was mad, forgets he wanted to do anything but sit here in the warmth of Remus’s body. “You feeling okay?”

“Never better,” Sirius says, an absolute lie, but it does feel true with Remus looking at him like that, all the world lit up in the moonshine. In the sky, the orb is just barely a sliver, shivering its way to New, and Remus in front of him is human and fragile. Sirius has been scheming about the wolf, has started to look at very old books in the restricted section, but none of it is ready to share with Remus yet, though the secret of it is thrilling.

“Take your boy for a walk,” the kid Remus was speaking to suggests, and smiles. “We’ll hold the window for you.” 

Sirius opens his mouth to object to being called anyone’s “boy,” but Remus is already nodding and helping them both up. Standing, the world tilts, reframes, and Sirius can taste his own tongue heavy in his mouth. 

There’s security around the back of the hall, so they veer left and end up underneath where the balcony juts out and they can still hear the sound shaking Alexandra Palace by the beams. The Dead are playing “Wharf Rat,” Sirius thinks and Remus is dancing, still holding Sirius’s hands, swaying to the measured beat.

“Are you sober?” Sirius asks, though there’s no way the answer can be yes.

Remus chuckles. “More sober than you, at least,” he says. Sirius can see the curve of his smile, his full red mouth, in the light reflecting through the windows. “Thought we maybe lost you there for a bit.”

“What’s that boy’s name?” Sirius asks Remus’s shoulder.

“What?”

“The boy you were chatting up.”

“I wasn’t chatting him up,” Remus says, but he’s still smiling so Sirius hasn’t managed to offend him. “And I don’t know, actually. We got to talking and then it was too rude to ask, you know?”

They sway in silence for a few longer minutes and when Remus speaks his face is too close, his mouth almost against Sirius’s cheek. 

“You’re not...freaking out, are you? About the gay thing?” Remus asks. Up close he’s shaking a bit, even as he’s smiling, and Sirius wants to reassure him that it’s fine, it doesn't matter, and he doesn’t mind at all really and he opens his mouth to do so and then licks, just at the corner of Remus’s mouth, a small quick swipe that couldn’t really be explained away, even if Sirius had an explanation.

Remus freezes. Sirius expects the music to freeze too, expects the whole world to crumble to dust as the taste of Remus’s skin settles against his tongue the way that Sirius has always hoped it would, the way he’s been fantasizing about since halfway through July when Remus wrote him a letter about swimming in the lake behind his house and Sirius had dreamed about salt on clammy skin and eyes tinged with animal yellow.

“Did you...mean to do that?” Remus whispers.

Sirius can’t stop staring at him, even as his stomach is doing backflips, his heart making mincemeat of his nerves. “No,” he says.

“Oh,” Remus’s voice is just as lost and then, suspended on a wire, it’s impossible to know who leans in first, only that Remus’s bottom lip is between his own and behind the closed skin of his eyelids, Sirius sees fireworks.

Remus’s mouth tastes like sugar and cloves and faintly of the brownie from hours ago. He’s got his hands on Sirius’s waist and Sirius gets his up to frame Remus’s jaw, kiss into him like he has any idea what he’s doing. Their teeth clack, hit at each other. Remus tilts his head and goes in again and accidentally clips Sirius on the side of his skull and it hurts so much they have to stop and laugh into each other’s shoulders and foreheads and whatever body part they can reach. Sirius holds Remus to keep himself upright as they’re both shaking with silent giggles and he can’t imagine letting go or having to look Remus in the eye ever again. Better to just stay here, Sirius thinks, close and unable to see each other. 

“Am I dreaming?” Remus asks into Sirius’s collarbone.

“Maybe,” Sirius says. It feels like it could be a dream. 

He’s never felt so free before, so untethered to anything. They could miss the portkey back, ditch Dearborn and the others. Never go back to Hogwarts, or to Sirius’s terrible house, and just live out in the woods here. They could follow the Dead around, fly to America with their new, unwashed friends and just do this, every single night till the end of time. 

“C’mere,” Sirius murmurs, which is utter nonsense because Remus cannot get any closer, but Remus figures it out and tilts his head up with his eyes closed in absolute, blind trust and when they kiss again it's magic. 

Eventually they stretch out in the grass and Sirius is so turned on and cannot possibly imagine getting hard with this much weed in him, and so they just mouth at each other through the next two songs, hands cloying and lazy by degrees. Sirius worries he’s using too much tongue but Remus doesn’t seem disgusted, so he keeps biting and pulling and gets Remus half on top of him before they collectively run out of steam and sort of just collapse, breathing in the September chill and waiting for the jam to turn into something else. 

“Don’t snog Dearborn anymore,” Sirius blurts out. It’s nonsense, he knows, but Remus laughs and rubs his hands up and down Sirius’s sides, his fingernails just barely making contact.

“Okay,” Remus says.

They lie back in the grass watching the moon move across the sky, fingers playing against each other. Every chord or so, he can’t help it, Sirius looks over and lets Remus take his mouth again in messy, overloud kisses that stop whenever they start laughing- at each other, maybe, or just at how good their luck is.

Eventually, they find their way back to the bathroom window and one of the girls helps them crawl back inside the hall, Remus breaking Sirius’s fall with his waiting arms. Sirius waits patiently while Remus hugs their new friends goodbye and when they head back into general admission, they find nearly everyone is sitting, swaying to a song Sirius can’t identify but that he loves the chorus of. Remus leans back into his body where they’re standing by the stairwell and Sirius wants to dance with him forever, wants to go home and fall into an exhausted sleep. 

The drums twinkle out and the guitar gets lighter and then, just then, they both hear the distinctive opening notes of “Sugar Magnolia.”

Sirius turns just in time to catch Remus’s face light up, his eyes glowing and his mouth morphing into a brilliant smile. He laughs like seashells cracking open and Sirius grabs his hands and pulls them into the crowd that’s struggling up around them, everyone jumping and flailing about in pure uncoordinated joy. 

“She’s got everything delightful,” Remus sings along in Sirius’s ear. He’s got a terrible voice, they all tease him about it with his vocal cords all shredded from years of howling, and still Sirius wants to crawl inside him, holding his hands and spinning them around. “She’s got everything I need.”

Sirius can’t help it then, he leans in and gets Remus in half a kiss, their mouths almost missing each other in the press of the crowd. If he was sober, he’d attempt a disillusionment charm but no one is watching them, they’re lost beneath heaving bodies and the bright lights of the stage but it feels unbelievably daring and the best promise. Remus laughs again, lets go of one of Sirius’s hands to get his cheek. The music fades as they press closer and Sirius thinks it might be in his head but then it starts up again, the whole stadium clapping along as Jerry and Donna Jean chant, riffing off each other against the Wall of Sound.

“Sunshine daydream,” Remus sings against his mouth. Sirius kisses him again, just as hard. “Oh, oh-”

“Yeah,” Sirius says and it’s song, it’s wonder, Remus kissing him back like he knows, he can only agree that yes this really is the best thing in the world. 

Eventually, the guitars bleed out and they’re left standing there, the world cheering around them and maybe for them. Sirius rests his forehead against Remus’s and thinks maybe it all makes sense now. Leave it to Remus to answer a question before Sirius even knew how to ask it.

There’s calls from the audience for an encore. Remus lifts his head up, beaming underneath the stage lights, and then something beyond Sirius catches his eye and he tugs the boy along, dragging them through the gathered crowd until Sirius sees it too- Penelope and Dearborn and the other seventh years.

“There you are!” Dearborn yells when they’re in earshot. The band had already started the final song, something full of jazz and rhythm that has Sirius dancing in his spine. “We were thinking we might have to accio you.”

“Bathroom,” Remus offers as an explanation for their many-houred disappearance. Dearborn seems to find that amusing as he turns and dances with the girl beside him, Remus swaying along. Sirius doesn’t mind though, not with Remus still holding his hand, their palms melded together with sweat and nerves as The Dead play themselves off. Remus cheers and whoops and does not let go, not even to clap at the very end.

It’s easy enough in the massive crowds that disperse to sneak away to the woods again. There’s a few new faces by the Portkey- adult wizards who must live in Hogsmeade, Sirius suspects- but they all regard each other with quiet respect and wait till the bag glows blue to send them spinning right back to Scotland. Sirius rights himself behind the Hog’s Head and Remus is still holding his hand, already standing straight and making polite conversation with one of the new faces. Sirius is still somewhat out of his body and he thinks he wants to spend the rest of his life standing next to Remus, watching him move through the world like it was his for the taking.

“Lupin,” Dearborn calls out, coming over. “Sam’s got a way through the back gates, if you wanna come.” 

“Oh, we’ll be alright,” Remus says, smiling, his back pressed just so to Sirius’s side. “We have a mate who’s gonna let us in by the tower.”

Dearborn isn’t stupid, Sirius can tell, and he seems to know well enough when he’s being brushed off. But to his credit- and it’s easier now to be nice to him with Remus’s fingers in between his own, Remus’s taste still in his mouth- he smiles and says, “Best of luck,” before running to catch up with the older kids.

Remus and Sirius are left standing by the inn, shoulders pressed together, breathing the cold air in sharp breaths. Sirius feels Remus sigh and he supposes they’ll have to talk about this tomorrow but maybe they won’t have to. He has no idea what he’d even say, but maybe Remus can solve that too, the way he solved them tonight.

“I can’t believe we have double potions at eight,” Remus speaks into the dark. “I already feel sore.”

“Yeah, like Slughorn isn’t smoking gillyweed in the storage cupboard before class,” Sirius manages a joke, hoping to hear Remus laugh.

Remus doesn't disappoint. “I don’t wanna walk all the way back to the castle,” he says, after he finishes giggling. Sirius pulls back to smirk at him.

“Want me to carry you?” Sirius says. He’s only half kidding.

“Yes please,” Remus says, like he doesn’t believe it, and maybe that’s what makes Sirius reach out and hoist Remus into his arms, struggling to run with him down the empty cobblestone streets. Or maybe it’s the way Remus shrieks and twists against Sirius’s body, clutching at Sirius’s shoulders and yelling “Put me down, Black,” and not meaning it as Sirius heads towards the tunnel, his fingernails dug into the meat of Sirius’s skin and his heartbeat loud against the drum of Sirius’s ear, all of them intertwined, as they make their way home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's Day, loves!
> 
> I really told myself I'd write a Marauders fic where they're not just doing drugs for 5,000 words and I wrote this. Maybe next time. 
> 
> If you're so inclined, you can listen to this concert in its entirety [HERE](https://archive.org/details/gd1974-09-11.sbd.unknown.4647.shnf/gd74-09-11v3d1t01.shn) (you can listen to any Dead concert there, it's kind of spectacular). And [HERE](https://shakinstreetblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/the-grateful-dead-shakes-picks-21-9111974-alexandra-palace-london/) is an incredible writeup of that show if you can read Spanish. I hope whether you're seeing others or not today, you take some time to love yourself.


End file.
